


if i'm stuck out here alone, no perfect love will grow (no widows left to know)

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, consider this. brightgeist, just. think abt it. leylas and jourrael., not saying that's who saffe is but i'm also not NOT saying that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:41:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23734012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: “So you were born broken, and given a second chance by the Stormlord. You wouldn’t be the first.”“No one’s born broken.”Jourrael says nothing to this.Feeling brave, heart-thuddingly brave, she inches sideways until their shoulders almost touch.“No one’s born broken,” she says. “Not even you.”
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Jourrael | The Inevitable End & The Laughing Hand & Yasha, Jourrael | The Inevitable End & Yasha, The Laughing Hand & Yasha (Critical Role)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 76





	if i'm stuck out here alone, no perfect love will grow (no widows left to know)

**Author's Note:**

> title from no widows by the antlers, listening to which on loop at 1 am is the entire reason this exists

Jourrael takes a seat on the roof besides her. Below, the ground is soaking up the snow of the evening, drawing it down towards plants that await warmer days.

"We’re not friends.”

Yasha laughs. “You keep saying that.”

“I don’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

“Then give me the right one,” she says. “Why do you keep coming back?”

Jourrael scowls and shifts a little further away.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to not have friends, you know.”

“I’m not built for friendship.”

“That’s what I thought, too, until I met Molly.”

Jourrael’s scowl lifts slightly, into confusion.

“That wasn’t one of the names Obann gave me.”

“He died. Before all this.“

“People do that, when they’re not like us.”

She looks over at Jourrael. She’s stopped wearing the headband, and at the roots her hair is starting to come in lighter and lighter, almost silvery.

“You can always make two groups out of people, put yourself in one and everyone else in another. It’s harder to put yourself near other people, but that doesn’t mean you don’t belong there.”

Jourrael says nothing for a long moment.

“He got you wrong. The Orphanmaker he talked about, that’s not you.”

“No.”

“Were you ever her?”

“I think so, once,” and she looks at her hands. “I don’t think I ever had feathers, before.”

“So you were born broken, and given a second chance by the Stormlord. You wouldn’t be the first.”

“No one’s born broken.”

Jourrael says nothing to this.

Feeling brave, heart-thuddingly brave, she inches sideways until their shoulders almost touch.

“No one’s born broken,” she says. “Not even you.”

“I was made broken. It doesn’t matter now, even if you’re right.”

“Does she still speak to you? The Queen?”

Jourrael wraps her rail-thin arms around herself, like she’s cold. “No.”

“Then you don’t have to stay what she made you.”

“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe you’re right.”

The silence is a little lighter, a little thinner every time it falls.

“Do you miss him? The Hand?”

Yasha blinks.

“Yes.”

“Me, too.”

She reaches into her furs and produces the little book, flips to the page with the fabric and then one before, to the page with the flower he’d given to her, in the Lotusden.

“There are powerful clerics in the world, you know.”

“Yes,” Yasha says, and feels warmth crawl to her cheeks. She thinks of Jester, of being carried for the first time since she was a child, of paint smears and a wall covered in flowers, of the room below where she hopes she’s being waited for, hopes she’s being missed. “I know a few of them.”

“They could bring him back. If he wanted.”

She thinks of the Hand waving his— well, his hand— and pulling his dogs from the shadows, turning around and around while they circled his feet. His posture shrinking when Obann snapped in his direction, his arm reaching to scoop up his dogs in a big pile while they were walking through marsh, holding them out of the reach of the mud and whatever lay beneath.

The sigh that issued out of all of those mouths when Caleb set him on fire. The way he’d just dissolved when Fjord touched him, like he’d been waiting to go for so long.

“I think he deserves to rest.”

“I suppose,” Jourrael says, “I have lost a friend, too, then.”

She removes the scrap of fabric and hands it to Jourrael.

“I knew I saved it for a reason.”

And then Yasha is privy to something she thinks no one alive has ever seen: Jourrael, the Caedogeist, the Inevitable End, crying. She holds the fabric against her chest and cries, quiet and then loud, ugly and ragged things, torn from her chest like pages from a book.

“Are we friends?” It’s a funny sound, somewhere between a whisper and a wail.

“We can be,” Yasha says. “Would you miss me, if I was gone?”

“Yes,” Jourrael breathes. “I would be alone again.”

“We’re friends, then.”

After Jourrael tucks the fabric into her robes, she considers it for a moment before taking her hand.

She runs cold. they both do. Jourrael’s hand is lost in hers and they sit on the edge of the inn roof. It’s snowing, again.

“I think my friends are in love,” Yasha says. The snow is melting against the roof, but somehow the sound feels muffled by it. Softened, but still cold.

“They were talking about you, when I was following them the first time. The blue one, she would cry in her sleep, and that angry human one would calm her down. It’s not just each other they love. Even I can tell that.”

The snow falls and she feels warm all at once, down to her toes. She wonders if Jourrael can feel it where their fingers lace.

“Were you ever in love?”

“Yes. I even remember it, a little, still. Her name was Saffe.”

Yasha says nothing.

“There was a spring, where we lived. No matter how deep you dug, the water came from below it. When you loved someone, you were supposed to give the water to one another to drink. I still remember how it tasted.”

Jourrael tips her head up. “When I came above for the first time, it was snowing. I couldn’t believe that there was something above ground that tasted like that water, but the snow was just like it. I understood why Kryn climbed, then. The surface had the things that were below, just not in the same place.”

The flakes are starting to get heavier, catching in her hair and dissolving into dark spots.

“I let my Queen tell me that people worth caring about didn’t exist here. It gets easier, when someone is gone, to believe that no one could feel the way they felt about you again. That they were something you weren’t supposed to have in the first place.”

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry. That you understand.”

“I’m sorry you do, too.”

She can feel when Jourrael starts to shake, again, just a little, not the violent upheaval of tears, but the quiet rattle of a body longing for warmth.

“It’s getting cold. Do you want to come inside?” Jourrael’s face twists, not angrily, so she continues. “No one else has to know.”

For the first time, Jourrael smiles and it reaches her eyes.

“Thank you, Yasha. You should ask again, if we see each other after tonight.”

“But?”

“But you have people waiting for you, inside.” She shuffles onto her knees, and then stands, the wind catching her hair out into a long red stream in the night. “And I want to taste the water, again. It has been a very long time.”

Yasha hops off the roof and stands outside the door with her heart loud in her mouth and ears for a moment. She thinks about Jester and about the sketches of her and Beau she’s seen when Jester flips between pages, she thinks about Beau and that raw, open look in her eyes she gets when she or Jester heal the things she swears she’ll sleep off. She thinks about how half of the Caedogeist left behind when she was sundered was her heart.

Then, she stamps the crust of snow from her boots and goes inside.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm @seafleece on tumblr, come say hello!! i'm about to go to sleep but i'm lost in the sauce on brightgeist, someone yell with me about this


End file.
